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Heart Is Where the Home Is. Some Reflections on the Line between Wisdom and Knowledge^*

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On the 16th of November, 1853, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mother died. She was 85 years old, and had been living with him and his family for 18 years, since 1835, when he bought his first house. His daughter Ellen, then 15, was away from home at the time, at a boarding school in the village of Lenox. So Emerson had to inform her of the loss in the family by mail. In a brief but moving passage, he described his mother’s funeral like this:

Your grandmother’s end was so peaceful, and all remembrances of her life in everybody’s mind so pleasing, that there was no gloom about the event such as usually belongs to it. Only the house has one less home in it, one less to be interested in, & to enjoy what befals you. (Rusk 1939: 399-400)

Now I can’t speak for you, but there is something about the sentiments expressed in these two sentences that touches me very deeply. It obviously touched Ellen very deeply, too, because she never forgot these words. And when Emerson himself died, almost 30 years later, she used the same phrases in remembrance of him, and the gentle effects of his life (Baker 1996: 356-7).

There are many things I could say about this heartfelt, informal epitaph, and each one would take my talk in a different direction. I could point out how it confirms Emerson’s will to see the good in every aspect of human experience, including the death of a loved one. I could consider the importance in Victorian America of the written message of consolation to the bereaved. (Emily Dickinson became a private expert in composing this kind of delicately comforting letter to her family and friends.) I could also talk about how death is the ultimate teacher, in that it finally makes us understand what is really important in life. Or, taking that idea one step further, I might discuss the various ways we can think of death as a form of revelation.

But I prefer to leave those subjects, each one interesting in its own way, for another occasion and to focus our attention instead on something else, on the feeling and sense of the expression itself: “Only the house has one less home in it, one less to be interested in, and to enjoy what befals you.” Maybe, if we listen to these words carefully and deeply enough, we can take this sentence as a model for poetry, a model for what it is and what it does.

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Those of us who are implicated in this questionable business of teaching literature are constantly tempted by the urge to broadcast explanations, to explicate—or even worse, to dictate meanings. I suppose that urge is comprehensible; explanation is, after all, one of the subtlest forms of power, of assuming authority. But are we really serving the literary work, or the minds of our students, when we yield too readily to that temptation?

What Emerson’s sentence means—a manifold truth of emotional experience—is already available to everyone, even though the exact source of its strength may not be so easy to define or to pin down. But then, literature is not about definitions. The important thing is to be able to touch the source of emotional strength, not to be able to define it.

Maybe the most uncomfortable problem we have to learn to live with is the fact that our discipline is useless—at least, materially useless. What do we do? We talk. What do we work with? Words. If we take Emerson’s passage as a model for poetry, what is it?

The truth is that it almost seems easier to say what it’s not.

It’s not, for example, a mathematical formula (oh how we love our mathematical formulas!). It’s not a grandiose theory; it can’t be tested and proved or disproved by experimental procedures. It doesn’t set out some important process for saving time or energy, some new technique to simplify our work. It’s not even something you can buy or sell. And nevertheless, in spite of its uselessness, it constitutes a lesson—a lesson about both living and dying, about love and care—that Ellen, at the age of 15, learned and never forgot.

Okay, it’s a lesson. But what sort of a lesson is it? Are we talking here about “facts”? Well, obviously not, if we only think of facts as objective phenomena that can be validated through scientific procedures. If, however, we admit the validity of another kind of fact, or truth, that can only be corroborated by an appeal to personal emotional experience, then we obviously are.

This other kind of fact, this subjective truth, which takes us essentially nowhere and does nothing but bring us back home to ourselves, this is the province of poetry.

You may recall that Robert Frost described the figure a poem makes as the same as the figure for love: that is, not thought and explication, but feeling, empathy and intuitive illumination. He calls it “ecstasy,” to signal that e-motion, deep feelings, move us. But where does this ecstatic motion that gives rise to poetry go? “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” The ecstasy of a poem, he says, “[...] ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion” (Baym 1989: 1112). No ambitious theories, no pretentious revelations, only the fragile comfort of a glimpse of clarity.

I hope you will agree with me that Emerson’s words to his daughter, uttered at that moment of what is probably the deepest loss we can experience, also offer a modest clarification of life and a momentary stay against confusion.

This is why I say those sentences of Emerson’s dwell in the province of poetry, and why, as well, it’s not necessary for me, or anyone else, to explicate their content. If you can respond to the message they convey, and I hope you can, it’s because they are telling you something that you already knew.

Now you may think that this appeal to tautology, to circular thinking, is facetious; but I assure you it’s not. Indeed, it brings us directly to the point I’m trying to make. Poetry is language whose sense reaches down to those interior regions where, as Emily Dickinson said, “the meanings are.” And it expresses those vague, unformulated meanings, that are our common heritage as human beings, so effectively that we can begin to comprehend them, and therefore, to understand ourselves. To paraphrase Robert Frost again, poetry is a way of remembering something that we didn’t know we knew. It brings our complex and ambiguous feelings and emotions into the light of consciousness, and in this way, it constantly keeps us aware of what we are.

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What I suppose I’m trying to remind you of here is that poetry, literature, art—all of the materials of our most humanistic disciplines—grow out of and impart a different kind of knowledge than the sciences—a subjective form of knowledge that arises primarily from emotion and intuition rather than empirical observation, measurement and calculation. And if anything significant is being said in this talk, it is probably the claim that this kind of “soft” knowledge is also, in its own way, valid and worthy of serious attention. At least as worthy of serious attention as the hard knowledge of the sciences.

If, as the western myth informs us, the scientist sells his soul for ever-increasing knowledge and power, it is the poet who tries to redeem it.

In this age of an almost exclusive faith in the absolute value of hard, objective knowledge, those of us who attempt to teach literature face, to an even greater degree, that problem I alluded to before. I don’t know about my colleagues, but I often wonder just what it is I’m supposed to be doing in the classroom (and I suspect my students do, too).

For many years now, there has been a tendency in the Humanities to mimic the Sciences. Because of the cultural prestige of the scientist, because of the relative simplicity of objective demonstration, because of the power granted by converting natural processes and human interactions (or even human beings) into data and percentages, because of the alluring charm of new techniques and technologies—for all of these reasons, and more, we have been hoping to hitch a ride on the scientific bandwagon.

And I think I am probably safe in suggesting that this same tendency is responsible for the dizzying and confusing apotheosis of critical theory, all of the famous -isms, in the last 20 or 30 years. Just as scientific theories tell us how we should understand the world, critical theories presume to give us comforting formulae for how we should understand art or literature.

But do they instead (as does science, in its subtle way), act as cultural blinders? Isn’t the “critical tool” actually a particular bias that gives us the satisfaction of understanding, but only at the cost of filtering out all of those uncomfortable or contradictory aspects of the artwork that the theory cannot account for? All too often we study the critical theory first. And then, once it is mastered, the act of criticism, or of teaching, consists in forcing the artwork to fit into a pre-conceived mold. If it is necessary to ignore those facets or facts that don’t confirm the theory, to snip off a few problematic corners, well, that’s also a tacit part of the intellectual game.

I would agree with those who maintain that the cultural enterprise of science, through its unavoidable influence on how we think about the world, acts to simplify human experience by breaking down the world into easily manipulable elements. It’s certainly true that we gain power and control by negating complexity. But at what cost? You only need to compare the scientist’s reductive formulation for salt, NaCl, which eliminates all personal and emotional connotations, with a poetic formulation such as Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a la sal” (Neruda 1957: 211-13), which restores the powerful experiential mystery of this essential ingredient of life, to see the kind of difference I am getting at.

It seems to me that our contemporary dependence on critical theory, in a similar way, acts in too many cases to betray the work of art. It may give us greater powers of interpretation, but it reduces complexity to simplicity and de-values richness.

I’m sure many people will disagree with what I’m about to say, but I don’t think we are here to exercise power and control, although exercising them is certainly both stimulating and materially gratifying. I don’t think our task as teachers and critics of literature is to offer simplifying or reductive explanations, or to use interpretation to further some ulterior program. Instead (and possibly more humbly), we should perhaps be trying to cultivate an awareness and appreciation of complexities, of ambiguity, of inexplicable uncertainties.

I think I should hasten to affirm that this is not intended to be a diatribe against science. You may as well denounce hair, or fingernails. Like them, science is a part of what we are. And obviously, our lives—or at least, the lives of a certain, very lucky portion of the human race—have been greatly improved in any number of ways by scientific discoveries and advances—especially in the field of medicine. We should be thankful for that. But it is also obvious that scientific discoveries and advances have brought us quite close, in any number of other ways, to the brink of destruction (if indeed, we have not already embarked on the gradual process of destroying ourselves).

What I am saying, however, is that, as a culture, we have been enchanted by the knowledge and power that science has offered us, but at the same time we have lacked the necessary wisdom and restraint to use them responsibly. It may be ingenuous to ask, but the question this inevitably leads to is: “Will we be able to acquire the necessary wisdom and restraint to control our own power before it is too late?”

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Those two forms of “hard” and “soft” knowledge I talked about earlier correspond to the two ways of using the mind that Emerson called Reason and Understanding. He already realized, 160 years ago, that we are terribly free, even though we may not know it. We are free to choose the kind of world we live in by choosing, either consciously or unconsciously, the way think about it. He was already expressing the potential existence of the quandary we face today when he wrote in 1836 that:

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant become unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. (Porte 1983: 43)

Emerson never denied the importance of science, nor the astonishing efficacy of the scientific mentality. But he clearly recognized the need to be able to think about the world in both ways in order to keep it whole. In fact, it would probably be accurate to say that his whole philosophy was based on the one question of learning how to use the mind more flexibly, of developing what we might think of as different “registers” of thought. Maybe the real task that those forerunners of modernity we refer to as Romantics set for us is simply (simply—but with what profound repercussions!) to redress the balance between the objective, calculating empirical knowledge of “Understanding” and the subjective, intuitive knowledge of “Reason.”

We are not scientists. We aren’t here to dictate meanings, to manipulate power, or even to formulate ambitious systems of understanding. Our province, as critics and teachers of literature, is the same as the province of poetry. If it is true that art provides us with images that we need to survive, with clues to more viable forms of living, then maybe the best we can hope for is, on a few occasions, to make some kind of positive contribution to a constructive understanding of those images and clues.

What I am proposing here is that the proper apprehension of the messages contained in art comes not primarily through the intellect, but through the emotions, not through the head but through the heart. It may be necessary for us, both as teachers and students, to resist the temptation to use the tools of theory to impose our will on the artwork, and to learn, instead, to make ourselves its servants.

But here again, let me hasten to point out that I am not at all suggesting that we merely deliver ourselves to raw, undisciplined emotion—which has much too often been the simplistic response to the problems posed by the romantic revolution. No, I am talking about feeling informed by responsible intelligence, about the need to learn, or to remember, how most propitiously to join those two essential qualities of feeling and thought that constitute our human nature.

This is not an easy adjustment to make, and no one is going to produce an easy formula to guide us. Unfortunately, there are no objective standards or canons for evaluating wisdom, no time-saving devices or cost-effective techniques for attaining it. But that doesn’t mean we can afford to forget it, either.

Maybe the first step on the way is simply to admit that we aren’t important, that our discipline, like art itself, is materially useless. On the other hand, though, it just might also be that this very uselessness composes a line that connects wisdom and knowledge, while too many of our intellectual disciplines tend to draw a separating line between them.

As I said before, poetry, literature and art only finally serve to bring us back home to ourselves, and repeatedly remind us of what we are. But we deeply need those perplexing and often unsettling reminders. And we need to be able to assimilate them in all of their paradoxical ambiguity, with all of their internal contradictions. Because we’re constantly on the verge of forgetting what we are. And it’s then, when we permit ourselves to forget, that we begin to be dangerous.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Carlos. 1996. Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. New York: Viking Press.

Baym, Nina et al. (eds.). 1989. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition, Vol. 2. London: W. W. Norton & Company.

Neruda, Pablo. 1957. El tercer libro de las odas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S. A.

Porte, Joel (ed.). 1983. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York: The Library of America.

Rusk, Ralph L. (ed.). 1939. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1848—1855. New York: Columbia University Press.

^* Originally published in Francisco Fernández (ed.). Los estudios ingleses: situación actual y perspectivas de futuro. València: Universitat de València, 1999. 251-59.